Dr. Fran Lewis: Breast cancer affects whole families

By Kathleen Dannenhold
School of Nursing

In 1958, Nikita Kruschev was in power, Sputnik had just been launched, and Americans were challenged to “keep up” with the Russians. That was the year that high school student Frances Marcus first became interested in learning the Ukranian language, an interest fueled by her family’s roots in the Ukraine and the recent death of her father, who had been born there. Little did she know that she was also planting the first seed of two life-long passions that would ultimately merge half a world away to help hundreds of women devastated by breast cancer.

Fran Lewis in her office

As Dr. Frances Marcus Lewis, an internationally-recognized nurse scientist and Elizabeth S. Soule Distinguished Professor of Nursing and Health Promotion, Lewis has spent her professional career focusing on one subject: helping women with life-threatening disease heal emotionally as well as physically, and helping their children and spouses survive as a family.

Believing that “health-care professionals need to be about the business of healing the family, not just killing the cancer cells,” Lewis has spent almost 20 years working with a team of researchers to develop and test interventions to be used at home or in health care settings. She now knows these programs work, and has gained a national and international reputation for her scholarship. But a major hurdle remains: implementing her research in the clinical environment.

“Women going home from the hospital after the birth of a child get more on-going support about breast feeding than do women who are sent home after breast cancer surgery,” she explains. “It is all left to the family.”

Changing the ways that programs are delivered and insurance policies are written will take time -and a whole new set of skills. In the meantime, Lewis has had amazing success helping women in a city where 1,600 new cases of breast cancer - over three times the typical number of cases in U.S. hospitals - are diagnosed every year. That city is Kiev, located less than 100 miles south of Chernobyl in the Ukraine. Radioactive pollution is believed to be a factor.

With the assistance of a grant from a Seattle non-profit firm whose mission is to offer health-related technologies in culturally-appropriate ways, Lewis has traveled to the Ukraine four times, developing training materials and conducting intense clinical workshops. “In a country where four years ago women weren’t even told they had cancer, we have created a new, interactive environment offering imagery and relaxation, problem solving and counseling,” Lewis explains. “Women have learned about being survivors.”

Lewis is easily brought to tears as she describes the destitute families who brought her flowers and gifts in appreciation for her help. She and her team trained over 110 doctors, nurses and psychologists and the Ukrainian government has implemented her program at multiple sites throughout the country.

Meanwhile, in her own country, Lewis and co-investigator Patricia Brandt have just been awarded a multi-million dollar grant to conduct a four-state clinical trial of “Enhancing Connections,” a multi-component educational and counseling intervention for mothers in the early stages of breast cancer and their school age children. Lewis describes the “disenfranchised grief” such children often experience as they deal with mothers who are exhausted and in extreme distress. “It is horrific what some of these children carry in their hearts,” she says.

One day Lewis hopes the fruits of her research may reach to every corner of this country in the way that her research about healing the whole woman after breast cancer surgery is being implemented in the Ukraine. Achieving that goal would be the final step in her career-long “journey toward healing,” a journey that has taken her back to the Ukraine while also propelling her forward toward the goal of providing every family with the programs and services they need to survive a life-threatening illness.